Pipers to Face Scots For 114th Time

As he does every Thursday before a game, HU head football coach John Pate gathered his troops to discuss plans for the upcoming game. This time, however, he brought along a prop -- a bucket that has been sitting in his office since the day Pate was hired.

It was no ordinary bucket. No, this was The Paint Bucket, a trophy invented in the mid 1960s and given annually to the winner of the Hamline-Macalester football game. The Pipers have held the trophy for much of the time, including last year's 49-30 victory over the Scots at Klas Field. Saturday, the Pipers (and the bucket) will trot down Snelling Ave for a 1:00 p.m. game at Macalester. (The Scots no longer play football in the MIAC. So this is a non-conference game.)

You can watch the game online or simply look at the game stats by clicking here.

About that bucket, Chuck Slocum, a 1969 HU grad who is the president of The Williston Group, a professional business consulting agency in the Twin Cities, sent along a note this week about its origins.

"I
was the guy who, as Freshman Class president in 1965, helped to create the
“Paint Bucket” in concert our other
class officers, Bill Johnson and Stephanie Lavorini, in joint sponsorship
with the Macalester Freshman Class president, George Yu and, as I recall, another officer,
Harold
Coulter. It
was done as a symbolic statement to discourage the then popular campus spray
painting episodes undertaken in the late night time hours by sometimes not
completely sober, mostly male students, visiting the others campus," he wrote.

The scores of the games have been painted on the bucket ever since.

As for this week's game, HU is 0-3 overall while the
Scots stand 1-3. As Pate reminded his team Thursday, one of the strengths of college football is its rivalries. And this one has had some staying power. Depending on whose math you believe in, the meetings between the two St. Paul schools rank as the 5th or 7th oldest
in the country. They first played in 1887. In all, they have faced each
other a total of 113 times with Hamline holding a 67-42-4 all-time edge.

To
make it to win No. 68, the Pipers are hoping to return to the form they
showed two weeks ago when they went toe-to-toe with Augsburg before
falling 28-20 at Klas Field. In that game, HU had nearly 300 yards
total offense and held Augsburg to just 123 yards passing. The latter
stat looks even more noble when you note that the Auggies traveled to
Collegeville last week, threw for 401 yards and scored a last-second TD
to beat the Johnnies, 32-31.

Connor Sathre (Sr., Maple Grove, Minn.) threw for two scores to Terry Schwartz (Sr.,
Saint Paul, Minn.) and ran for a third against Augsburg. Alas, things
didn't go as well offensively last week in a 34-0 loss at Carleton. A
return to that offensive form this week plus more efforts like the one Olajuwan Stiffler (So.,
Troutdale, Ore.) had on defense at Carleton (12 tackles) could go a
long ways towards giving Coach Pate a reason to get out the paint brush
and add a new score to the bucket.

Hamline returns to the MIAC and Klas Field next Saturday when they play host to Gustavus Adolphus in a 1:00 p.m. game.